Engels's letter to Bebel was written 28/III. 1875. Marx's letter to Bracke containing criticism of the Gotha Programme was written more than a month later: 5. V. (May) 1875 ("Neue Zeit," IX, 1, [p. 573]) (1890-1891, No. 18)

At first glance Marx appears in this letter to be far more of a "statist" — if one is permitted to use that crude expression of our enemies — than Engels.

* See Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 35, pp. 182-183. Ed.

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V. I. LENIN

Engels proposes (1) not to speak of the state at all; (2) to replace this word with "commune"; (3) even declares the Commune (i.e., the "dictatorship of the proletariat") to be "no longer a state in the proper sense" — whereas Marx says not a word about all this; on the contrary, he even speaks of (von) "dem zukünftigen Staatswesen der kommunistischen Gesellschaft"!! ("Neue Zeit," IX, 1, p. 573). (Here, p. 16 below.) At first glance one might receive the impression of a flat contradiction, confusion, or divergence! But this is only at first glance.

Here is the fully decisive passage (on this point) from Marx's letter: "The 'present-day society' is capitalist society, which exists in all civilized countries, more or less free from medieval admixture, more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country, more or less developed. On the other hand, the 'present-day state' varies with the country's borders. It is one thing in the Prussian-German Reich and another in Switzerland (572), one (573) thing in England and another in the 'United States.' The 'present-day state' is thus a fiction.

However, the various states of the different civilized countries, despite their motley formal differences, all have in common that they stand on the ground of modern bourgeois society, only more or less capitalist-developed. They therefore also have certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense one can speak of the 'present-day state system,' in contrast to the future, when its present root, bourgeois society, will have died away.

The question then becomes: what transformation will the state system undergo in a communist society? In other words, what"

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